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'Compassionate' Conservatism isn't Conservatism

There’s only one thing I fear more than a small Conservative majority in the coming General Election and that’s a large Conservative majority.

This is what I shall be explaining at the annual parliamentary rally of the Young Britons Foundation in the Commons this afternoon. They’ll probably be quite shocked, as they were by my similarly robust take on “compassionate Conservatism” last year. That’s because, even though the YBF is “notionally a non-partisan, not-for-profit research and training organisation” which “combats bias in the education system and mainstream media, seeking to train and inform young politically charged activists” it seems to me that far too few of these kids are interested in conservative ideology. They just want to get on in the Tory party, which isn’t the same thing at all.

So my job is to try to give the conservative political class of tomorrow the backbone the conservative political class of today is so sorely lacking. Key to this is helping them to understand that “Progressive Conservatism” is an oxymoron, and that the “Compassionate” in “Compassionate Conservatism” is a redundancy.

Conservatism does not need to prettify itself by adopting all-women shortlists or forcing its MPs to spend a Saturday afternoon painting the walls in the new drug rehabilitation centre or claim that a creaking, top-heavy, grotesquely inefficient state healthcare system introduced in the era of rationing and be-grateful-for-what-you-get represents the three most important letters in your ideologically bankrupt salesman’s fantasy world or cosying up to charlatans like the Red Tory or adopting “green” policies guaranteed to wipe out your economy and destroy the British countryside or talk about “equality” and “fairness” as if they were anything other than the dangerous buzzwords of subversive Marxist dialectic. When you do things like this you are not improving the Tory brand or making it more ‘relevant’ for the modern age. You are diluting it; enfeebling it; allowing its policies to be dictated according to the terms of the cultural left.

Progressive Conservatism was a disaster for George W Bush. It will be a disaster for David Cameron too.

The kids of the YBF won’t like being told this. But the sooner they wake up and smell the coffee, the sooner we can awake from this nightmare.